The Rackspace Cloud Goes Open Source with APIs

SAN ANTONIO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--In a major advancement of its open cloud strategy, Rackspace® Hosting (NYSE:RAX), the world’s leader in hosting, today announced it has open sourced the specifications for its Cloud Servers and Cloud Files™ APIs under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license. Developers are now free to copy, implement, and modify the specifications, helping to enable a truly open cloud.

“It's great to see Rackspace push the movement forward by getting more code into the hands of the community”

The Rackspace Cloud™ worked directly with developers in an open community to create the specifications and has now released them through Creative Commons. Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001, that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works, whether owned or in the public domain through its free copyright licenses.

"We welcome Rackspace’s decision to provide their client-side tools as open source to the community,” stated Rich Wolski, Chief Technology Officer, Eucalyptus Systems Inc. “It builds confidence among developers to know they can 'see' how the APIs function at a programmatic level. Moreover, by providing their API tools as open source, Rackspace is assuming a leadership position in helping to achieve cloud interoperability."

As part of its ongoing vision to open the cloud and speed cloud development, the company has also made available its Cloud Files language bindings for Java, PHP, Python, C#, and Ruby under the MIT license. The source code for these bindings is publicly available on GitHub, a public software versioning system, at http://github.com/rackspace, where external developers can now contribute. Rackspace has also produced a technical guideline for Cloud Servers language bindings which is also available on GitHub. This guideline will enable developers to build Cloud Servers bindings in a variety of languages, but with a consistent design and feel. Rackspace expects to offer a reference implementation in Python soon and is aware of Ruby, Perl, Java, and Twisted Python Cloud Servers bindings that are in the process of being developed.

Rackspace’s commitment to openness extends to its work with the community and expects to continue to expand the range of language bindings as developers provide them and work with developers to help ensure they are notified quickly of new features and updated technical specifications.

"It's great to see Rackspace push the movement forward by getting more code into the hands of the community," stated, Alex Polvi, CEO, Cloudkick, a leading cloud management platform developer. “We are thrilled to see the company moving so quickly and proactively to promote an open cloud.”

“Rackspace is committed to the development of open cloud solutions and standards. We are working quickly to offer a wide range of tools to help developers work with us to create these important building blocks for the cloud industry,” said Emil Sayegh, General Manager, The Rackspace Cloud. “Rackspace is dedicated to bringing a coordinated effort to cloud development. We are working directly with our ecosystem of developers and the broader industry to share what we create with the open source community. We believe open source APIs are an enabling factor in making interoperable non-proprietary cloud solutions a reality.”

About The Rackspace Cloud

The Rackspace Cloud provides on-demand scalable website, application and storage hosting backed by Fanatical Support®. Through its suite of cloud solutions, Cloud Sites™, Cloud Files™ and Cloud Servers, The Rackspace Cloud enables astute developers and IT managers to minimize the hassles, upfront investments and high costs associated with dedicated hardware while offering the ability to easily scale hosting resources. For more information about The Rackspace Cloud, visit www.rackspacecloud.com or call 1-877-934-0409.

About Rackspace Hosting

As the leader and specialist in hosting services, Rackspace® Hosting is changing the way businesses worldwide buy IT. Rackspace delivers computing-as-a-service, integrating the industry’s best technologies into a flexible service offering, making computing more reliable and affordable. A trusted partner to companies of all sizes, Rackspace enables IT departments to be more effective. Rackspace is distinguished by its award-winning Fanatical Support®, furthering the company’s mission to be one of the world’s greatest service companies. Rackspace is recognized as one of FORTUNE Magazine’s 100 Best companies to work for in the US, ranking number 43 on the list. Rackspace's portfolio of hosted IT services includes Managed Hosting, Cloud Hosting, and Email and Apps. For more information on Rackspace Hosting please visit www.rackspace.com.

Forward Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialize or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of Rackspace Hosting could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including any statements concerning expected development, performance or market acceptance associated with our Cloud Hosting products or acceptance or use of our API’s; anticipated operational and financial benefits from our Cloud Hosting products and services or from further use and development of our API’s; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include the possibility that benefits from our Cloud Hosting products may not materialize, due to a number of reasons including (i) a failure of the products to attain adequate reliability, quality or compatibility, (ii) changes in technology which adversely affect the benefit of the products, (iii) general economy or technology industry downturns, (v) internal strategy decisions that negatively impact the progression or development of the products, and (vi), and other risks that are described in Rackspace Hosting’s Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2009, filed with the SEC on May 12, 2009. Except as required by law, Rackspace Hosting assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements publicly, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.